Fine-grained temporal action parsing is important in many applications, such as daily activity understanding, human motion analysis, surgical robotics and others requiring subtle and precise operations in a long-term period. In this paper we propose a novel bilinear pooling operation, which is used in intermediate layers of a temporal convolutional encoder-decoder net. In contrast to other work, our proposed bilinear pooling is learnable and hence can capture more complex local statistics than the conventional counterpart. In addition, we introduce exact lower-dimension representations of our bilinear forms, so that the dimensionality is reduced with neither information loss nor extra computation. We perform intensive experiments to quantitatively analyze our model and show the superior performances to other state-of-the-art work on various datasets.

High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent exploration of learning approaches can lead to instabilities and the robot reaching joint limits at high speeds. Having hardware that enables safe exploration of high-speed and high-acceleration movements is therefore desirable. To address this issue, we propose to use robots actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs). In this paper, we present a four degrees of freedom (DoFs) robot arm that reaches high joint angle accelerations of up to 28000 °/s^2 while avoiding dangerous joint limits thanks to the antagonistic actuation and limits on the air pressure ranges. With this robot arm, we are able to tune control parameters using Bayesian optimization directly on the hardware without additional safety considerations. The achieved tracking performance on a fast trajectory exceeds previous results on comparable PAM-driven robots. We also show that our system can be controlled well on slow trajectories with PID controllers due to careful construction considerations such as minimal bending of cables, lightweight kinematics and minimal contact between PAMs and PAMs with the links. Finally, we propose a novel technique to control the the co-contraction of antagonistic muscle pairs. Experimental results illustrate that choosing the optimal co-contraction level is vital to reach better tracking performance. Through the use of PAM-driven robots and learning, we do a small step towards the future development of robots capable of more human-like motions.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a theoretically-backed framework for deep generative
models. However, they often produce “blurry” images, which is linked to their training objective. Sampling in the most popular implementation, the Gaussian VAE, can be interpreted as simply injecting noise to the input of a deterministic decoder. In practice, this simply enforces a smooth latent space structure. We challenge the adoption of the full VAE framework on this specific point in favor of a simpler, deterministic one. Specifically, we investigate how substituting stochasticity with other explicit and implicit regularization schemes can lead to a meaningful latent space without having to force it to conform to an arbitrarily chosen prior. To retrieve a generative mechanism for sampling new data points, we propose to employ an efficient ex-post density estimation step that can be readily adopted both for the proposed deterministic autoencoders as well as to improve sample quality of existing VAEs. We show in a rigorous empirical study that regularized deterministic autoencoding achieves state-of-the-art sample quality on the common MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

NIPS Workshop "Planning for the Real World: The promises and challenges of dealing with uncertainty", December 2003 (talk)

Abstract

Learning control and planning in high dimensional continuous state-action systems, e.g., as needed in a humanoid robot, has so far been a domain beyond the applicability of generic planning techniques like reinforcement learning and dynamic programming. This talk describes an approach we have taken in order to enable complex robotics systems to learn to accomplish control tasks. Adaptive learning controllers equipped with statistical learning techniques can be used to learn tracking controllers -- missing state information and uncertainty in the state estimates are usually addressed by observers or direct adaptive control methods. Imitation learning is used as an ingredient to seed initial control policies whose output is a desired trajectory suitable to accomplish the task at hand. Reinforcement learning with stochastic policy gradients using a natural gradient forms the third component that allows refining the initial control policy until the task is accomplished. In comparison to general learning control, this approach is highly prestructured and thus more domain specific. However, it seems to be a theoretically clean and feasible strategy for control systems of the complexity that we need to address.

Journal of the Korean Society of Civil Engineers, 23(6B):521-530, December 2003 (article)

Abstract

The previous ESP (Ensemble Streamflow Prediction) studies conducted in Korea reported that the modeling error is a major source of the ESP forecast error in winter and spring (i.e. dry seasons), and thus suggested that improving the rainfall-runoff model would be critical to obtain more accurate probabilistic forecasts with ESP. This study used two types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), such as a Single Neural Network (SNN) and an Ensemble Neural Networks (ENN), to
improve the simulation capability of the rainfall-runoff model of the ESP forecasting system for the monthly inflow to the Daecheong dam. Applied for the first time to Korean hydrology, ENN combines the outputs of member models so that it can control the generalization error better than SNN. Because the dry and the flood season in Korea shows considerably different streamflow characteristics, this study calibrated the rainfall-runoff model separately for each season. Therefore, four rainfall-runoff models were developed according to the ANN types and the seasons. This study compared the ANN models with a conceptual rainfall-runoff model called TANK and verified that the ANN models were superior to TANK. Among the ANN models, ENN was more accurate than SNN. The ANN model performance was improved when the model was calibrated separately for the dry and the flood season. The best ANN model developed in this article will be incorporated into the ESP system to increase the forecast capability of ESP for the monthly inflow to the Daecheong dam.

Beta-probes are a relatively new tool for tracer kinetic studies in animals. They are highly suited to evaluate new positron emission tomography tracers or measure physiologic parameters at rest and after some kind of stimulation or intervention. In many of these experiments, the knowledge of CBF is highly important. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the method of CBF measurements using a beta-probe and H215O. CBF was measured in the barrel cortex of eight rats at baseline and after acetazolamide challenge. Trigeminal nerve stimulation was additionally performed in five animals. In each category, three injections of 250 to 300 MBq H215O were performed at 10-minute intervals. Data were analyzed using a standard one-tissue compartment model (K1 = CBF, k2 = CBF/p, where p is the partition coefficient). Values for K1 were 0.35 plusminus 0.09, 0.58 plusminus 0.16, and 0.49 plusminus 0.03 mL dot min-1 dot mL-1 at rest, after acetazolamide challenge, and during trigeminal nerve stimulation, respectively. The corresponding values for k2 were 0.55 plusminus 0.12, 0.94 plusminus 0.16, and 0.85 plusminus 0.12 min-7, and for p were 0.64 plusminus 0.05, 0.61 plusminus 0.07, and 0.59 plusminus 0.06.The standard deviation of the difference between two successive experiments, a measure for the reproducibility of the method, was 10.1%, 13.0%, and 5.7% for K1, k2, and p, respectively. In summary, beta-probes in conjunction with H215O allow the reproducible quantitative measurement of CBF, although some systematic underestimation seems to occur, probably because of partial volume effects.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems